Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Auto tune the news rocks....

So the new Auto Tune the News was released a few days ago. #7!! if you haven't seen them, do yourself a favor and set aside a half hour to do so.

Musically, its not as good as #s 6 and 3, but thematically...wow, the meta ironies abound.

The lyrics they interject are for the most part about or a comment about the disparate treatment and conidions of whites and blacks. From there, they go into race relations.

Race relations!

oooh, the ironies.

Firstly, the Gregories and their friend are rapping, which is steeped in Black American cutlture: from the funk rap of Grandmaster Flash, to the East Coast, West Coast rivalry, to Topac to Biggie Smalls, to P Diddy, Lauren Hill, to Kanye West, and on and on. Whats more, its an auto-tuned electronica rap, a style popularized by T-Pain and Kanye West.

This is the musical genre a bunch of white kids chose to talk race relations.

ooooh, and it gets better.

They then feature Congressman Dan Lungren, and his speech on the house floor in which he rewrote the lyrics of "Trouble" from the Music Man. This is an - probably unintentional - homage to white's rap roots, and a time when Meredith Willson profited from the popularization of an early form of rap.

And to cap it all off, the end with setting Katie Couric on auto-tune and letting her run wild. (remind me, next time i need a melody for something, to just auto-tune Katie). Whats her topic? Texting. A Millenial mode of communication. Go figure...i saw a Gen-Y connection and i pointed it out =p

And yet...

this discussion ends playing on a Gen-Y matter/device. And when seen through the prism of the Millenial's Laissez-faire multiculuralism, the three white kids rapping - dressed in their rap/hip-hop finest and spouting "Shawty" - doesn't seem out of place at all.

I swear, this thing is an unintentional college thesis on cultrual integration and race relations waiting to happen.

~M

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Do you have guelph insurance? Because its better to be safe than to be sorry